The present invention relates to a lens shifting mechanism, and more particularly, but not exclusively, to a lens shifting mechanism suitable for being incorporated in a compact camera equipped with a small size zoom lens.
As is well known, compact cameras have a taking lens barrel formed together with the camera body and a lens systems with its associated elements incorporated partly in the lens barrel and partly inside the camera body. Due to such a construction of compact cameras, the overall length of the taking lens barrel is required to be as short as possible. On the other hand, there are many interchangeable lenses, for example zoom lenses, for use with single lens reflex cameras which have improved lens shifting mechanisms for zooming. One disadvantage of the conventional lens shifting mechanism is that at least two rotatable lens barrels with cam slots are needed to move two lens groups independently by different distances and, therefore, the overall axial length of the taking lens barrel becomes great and the barrels are large in diameter. For this reason, it is hard to equip compact cameras with the lens shifting mechanisms of the conventional interchangeable zoom lenses because then the overall size of the compact camera becomes large.